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Just recently I have been lucky enough to have had access, for testing, to the pre-release version of SequenceServer

$ gem install –pre sequenceserver

NB – At the time of writing this post I was using pre2, that has now been updated to pre4 and I have had several chats with both Anurag and Yannick via email, so some of the information below is possibly slightly out of date. I will work at updating this over the weekend, but for now wanted to publish this ‘as is’ so people can actually get to read/see it! 🙂

There are quite a few updates visually and in the underlying code. The interface is much cleaner now and the slightly garish orange/green colour scheme has been replaced by a frosty white and blue. The other major change is the output report of BLAST hits where we now have a graphical representation of where the hits align to the query – similar to the graphical report you see at NCBI’s web blast – but with a nicer colour scheme and the same image link map to take you to the relevant links. I would still like integration with CDD here to show protein domains… There are hints of more options to come, You can now download FASTA files of your sequences as well as XML and TSV copies of the BLAST report. I’ve not looked too much at the code-base changes as I am not completely au-fait with Ruby (Anurag tells me: “We now have a minified CSS and JS file each for production deploy. And a gzipped version of each as well. Using [the] gzipped version improves page load times by 70%.) but there are a few more gems required and what looks like a tidying-up of some of the code!

If you remember from my previous post, here, I had the need to set up multiple versions of SequenceServer for different sequencing projects – rather than have all the sequence databases appear under one server – each associated with their own domain usinf Phusion Passenger. I accomplished this by pulling the github repository to a local directory (/usr/share) and then creating a set of symlinks to the files within that directory to a directory for each of my projects (e.g. /etc/blast_project1, /etc/blast_project2). Then from my apache install (/var/www) creating another set of symlinks to each of the projects’ public folder. Although complicated, this allowed me to keep the repository up-to-date and keep each server running, and to be able to modify individual files by copying them and editing rather than using a symlink.

It worked remarkably well and other than when non-symlink files changed I didn’t get any problems other than WordPress making it difficult for sequence retrieval due to some .htaccess settings but that was easily sorted with a few settings changes in Apache.

This time I have had to figure out Ruby a bit more (still hate it! :p) as the pre-release version is installed via ruby gems but I have kept much of the same setup for testing. I will again attempt to keep a record below of how I achieved multiple SequenceServers running for multiple projects.

1. Ruby Gems Locations

You can find out where you local copy of Ruby Gems are installed by typing:

When I needed to update Ruby Gems (see below Section 5) they moved the location to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/ which is something to be aware of! So FRUSTRATING!

2. Symlink Directories

The final folder path for SequenceServer pre is either /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/sequenceserver-1.0.0.pre.2 or /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/sequenceserver-1.0.0.pre.2 and I am again going to make a chain of sym-linked directories to help manage the installation of multiple copies.

You could symlink directly to the gems directory but this way when SequenceServer updates to say sequenceserver-1.0.0.pre.3 or the final version etc, I can modify the 1st symlink and then I should be able to keep everything else in place… (you might have to re-run ‘bundle install’ too). Well, what will happen is that any files that no longer exist will be flagged (usually in red) that the symlink is broken [therefore you can delete those] and any new files in the new SequenceServer gems directory won’t be linked, but you can always symlink them one-by-one. Not the best solution but I can’t think of a better way when gems are managed in folders with version numbers 🙁 – if anyone has any thoughts on this I would like to hear them.

3. Static Config Files

Then we can go about setting up the config for this project (remove the symlink config.ru script and make it static and edit it to be specific to this project) note the dot…:

sudo rm config.ru
sudo cp /usr/share/sequenceserver1/config.ru .

Then modify the line that starts “SequenceServer.init” to look like (note the quotes and space before the colon are important):

SequenceServer.init :config_file => “/etc/blast_projectX/config.yml”

We also need to make one more change to this file – this might be due to the version of Sinatra I am running but I cannot be sure – the command “Run SequenceServer” needs to be changed to “run SequenceServer”. Note the word ‘run’ does not have a capital letter ‘r’.

run SequenceServer

The above should be fixed in pre4+. Yay!

Then we need to create the YAML config file, which contains the location of the blast databases for this project and the port to run on etc:

$ sudo nano config.yml

inserting your needed configuration (note ‘database’ is now written as ‘database_dir’):

4. Apache Configuration

Now we need to edit Apache’s configuration to allow Phusion Passenger to display the server as a RackBaseURI on a sub-domain. I won’t go in to installing Passenger here, there is information in my previous post and the SequenceServer website for that. But suffice to say, more configuration files have changed their location! In the latest version of Apache (2.4.7 in Trusty Tahr anyway) I have to edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf and put the relevant directory information in there.

In this example I have also added some password protection to the directory.

Now we need to add a symlink to the public directory in our project folder to the Apache webserver directory.

$ cd /var/www
$ sudo ln -s /etc/blast_projectX/public projectX

5. Troubleshooting

I also had to do a number of things to get the latest version of SequenceServer to run in the configuration above, these are detailed below. On a different server, although also running Ubuntu Trusty, running the pre-release straight from the command line I had no issues.

I received this error:

There was a ArgumentError while loading sequenceserver.gemspec:
Malformed version number string 1.0.0-2 from
/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/sequenceserver-1.0.0.pre.2/sequenceserver.gemspec:4:in `block in <main>’

To remedy it I had to update Ruby Gems from 1.8.3 to 2.4.5.

$ sudo gem install rubygems-update
$ sudo update_rubygems

But I am told when it hits final you won’t have to do that, but you will probably have updated anyway. Then you need to reinstall ‘bundler’:

sudo gem install bundler

I also needed to install the QT4 development pacakges to get the Capybara-webkit to compile.

$ sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev

And finally (do not run bundle as sudo, it will ask if/when it is needed) – I am running with the option ‘–without development’ here to remove the previous [strike through] error I had received:

bundle install –without development

One more oddity was that there was no Gemfile.lock in the SequenceServer gems directory so I created it (prior to running bundle install) and then symlinked it to the /etc/blast_projectX folder also. Bundle should create this but twice now, for me, it has not. Go figure!